Another State Department whistle-blower of sorts has come forward, this one with an axe to grind -- and it looks like Hillary's inner circle handed him the axe:
Following the attack in Benghazi, senior State Department officials close to Hillary Clinton ordered the removal of a mid-level official who had no role in security decisions and has never been told the charges against him. He is now accusing Clinton’s team of scapegoating him for the failures that led to the death of four Americans last year...“The overall goal is to restore my honor,” said Maxwell, who has now filed grievances regarding his treatment with the State Department’s human resources bureau and the American Foreign Service Association, which represents the interests of foreign-service officers...“I had no involvement to any degree with decisions on security and the funding of security at our diplomatic mission in Benghazi,” he said.The Daily Beast's Josh Rogin reports that Maxwell's non-firing firing "seems to conflict with the finding of the ARB that responsibility for the security failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi should fall on more senior officials." (Hyperlink mine). Maxwell is a mid-level career employee who was planning to retire in September. Now he's mired in disciplinary limbo; still drawing a paycheck, but not permitted to enter he building. He now believes Sec. Clinton's allies selected him as a suitable fall guy for their mess. He says they've been trying to get him to agree to "go away," reportedly going so far as to withdrew an initial arrangement to effectively reinstate him once the Benghazi controversy "blew over." Is this what "accountability" looks like?
The State Department declined to comment on the reasons that Maxwell and the other officials were placed on administrative leave, or on what the four were told about the reasons for the decision. It did confirm that the ARB did not recommend direct disciplinary action because it didn’t find misconduct or a direct breach of duty by the officials...Since the leave is not considered a formal disciplinary action, Maxwell has no means to appeal the status, as he would if he had been outright fired. To this day, he says, nobody from the State Department has ever told him why he was singled out for discipline. He has never had access to the classified portion of the ARB report, where all of the details regarding personnel failures leading up to Benghazi are confined. He also says he has never been shown any evidence or witness testimony linking him to the Benghazi incident.
Yes, that would be the same Cheryl Mills who dressed down whistle-blower Greg Hicks after he defied State Department (read: her) orders not to meet with Congressional investigators in Libya. And that would be the same Cheryl Mills who served as Sec. Clinton's chief of staff. Mills appears to be responsible for felling this sacrificial lamb, and I'd be willing to bet she was also involved in orchestrating Hicks' demotion after he complicated State's efforts at misdirection by asking pesky questions. Was Mills freelancing, or following direct (or tacit) orders to protect her boss? Hopefully Darrell Issa and company will get a chance to ask her under oath. Speaking of Congressional Republicans, they're getting fairly strong marks from the public on their handling of inquiries into the Benghazi matter. CNN's latest numbers, fresh this week (via Ed Morrissey):Soon after being removed from his job, Maxwell was visited at his home late one evening and directed to sign a letter acknowledging his administrative leave and forfeiting his right to enter the State Department. He refused to sign, responding in writing that it amounted to an admission he had done something wrong. “They just wanted me to go away but I wouldn’t just go away,” he said. “I knew Chris [Stevens]. Chris was a friend of mine.” The decision to place Maxwell on administrative leave was made by Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills, according to three State Department officials with direct knowledge of the events. On the day after the unclassified version of the ARB’s report was released in December, Mills called Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones and directed her to have Maxwell leave his job immediately...One State Department official close to the issue told The Daily Beast that Clinton’s people told the leadership of the NEA bureau that Maxwell would be given another job at State when the Benghazi scandal blew over. Maxwell said Jones assured him he would eventually be brought back to NEA as a “senior advisor,” but that Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, reneged.
A CNN/ORC International survey released Sunday morning also indicates that congressional Republicans are not overplaying their hand when it comes to their reaction to the three controversies that have consumed the nation’s capital over the past week and a half. And the poll finds that a majority of Americans take all three issues seriously…According to the poll, 44% say statements made by the Obama administration soon after the attack were an attempt to intentionally mislead the public. Half of those questioned say those statements reflected what the Obama administration believed, at the time, had occurred. But 59% now say that the U.S government could have prevented the attack in Benghazi, up 11 points from last November. And only 37% say that congressional Republicans are overreacting in their handling of the matter, with 59% saying they’ve reacted appropriately.That's +22 spread for Issa's crew; not bad at all, especially considering Republicans' polling problems on other fronts. The positive reviews are also deserved, too. House Oversight Republicans were sober and sharp during the latest round of Benghazi hearings. Committee Democrats, for the most part, were not. As House investigators continue to pursue the truth, it would behoove the White House to stop shrugging off substantive and serious questions as "irrelevant."
UPDATE - The White House earns Three Pinocchios from WaPo for their latest spin that the Benghazi emails exonerate the administration, and that Republicans "doctored" emails to paint an inaccurate picture. A majority in the new ABC News/Washington Post poll believe the White House is covering something up on Benghazi.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/05/21/benghazi-scapegoat-plus-cnn-poll-n1601756
What did Obama do on 9/11/2012?
Exclusive: Jack Cashill asks if BHO pulled a Clinton a la '96 during Benghazi attack
On this past Sunday morning, Chris Wallace of Fox News grilled the administration’s newly anointed flak catcher, White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer.One critical question was how Obama spent that long night of Sept. 11, 2012, while his charges were busy dying in Benghazi.
“With all due respect,” asked Wallace, “you didn’t answer my question. What did the president do that night?” This was a good question and one that prompts a careful look at the time line.
At 3:40 p.m. Washington time on Sept. 11, 2012, U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens in Benghazi called his No. 2 man, Greg Hicks, and told him, “We’re under attack.”
(All times cited will be EDT, six hours earlier than Libyan time).
At 4:05 p.m. the State Department Operations Center issued an alert to all relevant agencies, “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack.”
At 4:25 p.m. a six-member CIA team headed by Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods arrived at Stevens’ compound from the nearby annex.
Under heavy fire, Woods’ team recovered the body of Foreign Service IT specialist Sean Smith but could not find Stevens’ body in the burning building.
At 5 p.m. President Barack Obama had a pre-scheduled meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who briefed him on the Benghazi situation.
At 6 p.m. Woods and his CIA team arrived back at the annex, which they would defend Alamo-style for the next six hours. They would kill an estimated 60 Libyans before the night was through.
At 6:07 p.m. the State Department Operations Center shared a report from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the Benghazi attack. The terror group also called for an attack on the Embassy in Tripoli.
At 7:30 p.m. or thereabouts Obama engaged in an hour-long phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Obama hoped to mend fences with Netanyahu to help secure the Jewish vote in the upcoming election.
After roughly 8:30 p.m., there is no known accounting of Obama’s time or whereabouts.
At 11:15 p.m. Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, another former SEAL, were killed in a mortar assault at the annex. Doherty had just arrived as part of a six-man team from Tripoli.
At 1:40 a.m., having evacuated the annex, the first group of Americans flew out of Benghazi bound for Tripoli. They saw Stevens’ body at the airport and confirmed his death.
Said Pfeiffer to Wallace when asked about Obama’s evening, “He was in constant touch with his national security team and kept up to date with the events as they were happening.”
Wallace then listed all the critical people with whom Obama had little or no conversation – the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs.
“Was he in the situation room?” Wallace asked.
“I don’t remember what room he was in that night,” said Pfeiffer. “That’s a largely irrelevant fact.” No, it is not irrelevant at all.
I cannot say for sure where Obama was that evening, but if the night of July 17, 1996, set a precedent, Obama was likely in the White House family quarters.
For the record, at 8:35 p.m. on that turbulent night in the election year of 1996, President Bill Clinton and wife Hillary left a Washington fundraiser and headed back to the White House by motorcade.
At 8:31 p.m., two FAA veterans at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center observed a target arching and intersecting with Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 as it headed east off Long Island’s south shore.
A manager from that center rushed the radar data to the FAA technical center in Atlantic City, and from there it was faxed to FAA headquarters in Washington and rushed “immediately” to the White House situation room.
It was in this room, “in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing,” as Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos unwittingly told Peter Jennings on Sept. 11, 2001, that all key parties converged.
“This looks bad,” said Ron Schleede of the National Transportation Safety Board upon first seeing the data that “suggested something fast made the turn and took the airplane.”
Anti-terror czar Richard Clarke got the message too. By 9 p.m., he was driving in to the White House to convene a meeting of his security group, not at all the norm for a plane crash.
“I dreaded what I thought was about to happen,” Clarke wrote in his best-seller “Against All Enemies.” Clarke called it “The Eisenhower option,” a retaliatory strike against Iran.
When President Clinton met with friendly historian Taylor Branch on Aug. 2, 1996, he also traced the TWA 800 disaster to Iran. “They want war,” Branch quoted Clinton as saying.
On the night of July 17, however, the president chose not to join Clarke and the other agency representatives in the situation room.
Clinton remained holed up in the family quarters with Hillary. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson and others have confirmed the president’s location that evening.
Patterson was in a position to know. He carried the nuclear football for the president, and he too was in the White House that night, though purposefully kept out of the loop.
The one person Patterson has tentatively cited as being in the family quarters with the Clintons is Sandy Berger, the deputy director of the NSA and the Clintons’ political consigliere.
As it happened, National Security Adviser Tony Lake, Sandy Berger’ boss, was not invited to the family quarters. Lake was known to excuse himself from meetings when they turned political.
That night Berger and the Clintons gathered information from the FAA radar, from the satellite data and from the eyewitness accounts and translated the data into electoral strategy.
By 3 a.m. Clinton had apparently gathered enough information to call Lake with the following message: “Dust off the contingency plans.”
Dust them off, yes, but let’s not get too serious about them. In late summer 1996, with the election comfortably in the bag, war was the last thing the Clintons wanted or needed.
On Sept. 11, 2012, war was the last thing Obama wanted or needed as well. He had already bagged Osama bin Laden, pacified al-Qaida and liberated Libya.
Or so he repeated endlessly. Foreign policy was alleged to be his electoral strong suit. Given the political dynamics, Obama likely retreated, just as the Clintons had, to the family quarters.
As Pfeiffer said, Obama probably did talk to “people who would keep him up to date as these things were happening.”
Obama and certain of these people, the political insiders, would have spent the night translating national security data into electoral strategy.
After all, Obama had a big fundraiser the next day in Vegas. That did not allow much time to establish an alibi that would preserve his carefully crafted bin Laden-slayer narrative.
It was a close call, but with a little help from the media – a special shout-out to CNN’s Candy Crowley! – the alibi worked just well enough to get the man re-elected.
History does repeat itself.
http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/what-did-obama-do-on-9112012/
New whistleblowers coming forward on Benghazi?
At the end of the Benghazi hearing in the House Oversight Committee almost two weeks ago,chair Darrell Issa welcomed anyone else with knowledge of what happened before, during, and after the terrorist attack on the consulate to come forward and testify. According to PJ Media founder Roger L. Simon, that may happen soon. Two former diplomats told Simon that their colleagues have specific knowledge, but need legal protection before they can tell more of the story — and there is more to tell:According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really transpired in Benghazi that are potentially devastating to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.Simon notes that this is “largely hearsay,” second-hand representations of what the testimony will be. There isn’t any clear indication of where these whistleblowers worked in the Benghazi chain, but given the representations, they had to have had access to both State and White House deliberations and orders on high levels. That’s assuming that the whistleblowers have direct knowledge of what these diplomats shared with PJ Media and not second-hand information themselves. If that was the case, though, they probably wouldn’t need a legal way to work themselves into whistleblower protection.
The former diplomats inform PJM the new revelations concentrate in two areas — what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi and the pressure put on General Carter Ham, then in command of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and therefore responsible for Libya, not to act to protect jeopardized U.S. personnel.
Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.
Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”
This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.
The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.
Those aren’t the only fingers pointing to the former Secretary of State, either. The Hill reports that one of the existing whistleblowers wants more focus on a part of his testimony that mainly got overlooked — about why Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi in the first place. Hicks isn’t talking about recovering covert arms from Islamist terror networks, but because Hillary Clinton wanted a permanent outpost in Benghazi and needed it affirmed before the end of the fiscal year on September 30th:
Gregory Hicks, who briefly took over as head of mission when Stevens and three other Americans were killed, testified on May 8 that Clinton personally ordered the ambassador to turn Benghazi into a full consular post, and that she planned to announce the upgrade during a visit in December.Pickering will appear for a transcribed deposition on Thursday to answer questions about the conduct of the ARB. Pickering at first vociferously defended the report, which focused blame for Benghazi on lower-level staffers, but the White House undermined it last week in leaks to CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson that pointed fingers of their own at Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy. Another whistleblower, Eric Nordstrom, testified two weeks ago that the ARB deliberately ignored Kennedy’s role in preventing security requests from being approved.
Hicks’s attorney has been drawing attention to that section of his testimony, which was overshadowed by revelations that no one at the U.S. embassy in Libya believed the terrorist attack was preceded by a peaceful protest, and that the Pentagon told a special operations team to stand down.
“According to Stevens, Secretary Clinton wanted Benghazi converted into a permanent constituent post,” Hicks testified.
“Timing for this decision [to visit the region on Sept. 11] was important. Chris needed to report before Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, on the … political and security environment in Benghazi.”
He said Pickering appeared “surprised.”
“I did tell the Accountability Review Board that Secretary Clinton wanted the post made permanent,” Hicks testified.
“Ambassador Pickering looked surprised. He looked both ways … to the members of the board, saying, ‘Does the seventh floor [the secretary of State’s office] know about this?’”
The ARB appears to have ignored Hicks’s statement in its public report. Instead, the board appeared to place responsibility on Stevens.
Stay tuned. With 55% of Americans believing the White House has attempted to cover up on Benghazi, Congress has plenty of room to keep pressing for the real answers. Another committee plans on doing just that, with a focus on what happened to the US military when it was needed on September 11th:
On Tuesday members of the House Armed Services Committee will question Pentagon officials in a classified session. The committee chairman, Republican Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., last week told Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that he remains “deeply concerned” about unanswered Benghazi questions. In a letter to Hagel, McKeon said he wants to know more about:
1. The account of events from the commander of the U.S. Site Security Team in Benghazi, including “the orders he received from higher authority;”Question 1 deals with the “stand down order” and where it originated. Hopefully, the response to Question 4 will discover who thought ordering the emergency response team to conduct a training exercise that would take then off line on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
2. The presence of aircraft in the region, whether they were armed, how far they were from Benghazi, whether they would have needed in-flight refueling, and who in the military chain of command considered, or rejected, sending them to help;
3. The presence of unmanned aircraft in the region;
4. The status of a U.S. emergency team in Europe;
5. The presence of a Marine Corps Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team in the region;
6. What military preparations had been made to protect Americans in the area on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Just to make sure he got a quick response, McKeon noted that he wants answers before he finishes work on next year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which maps out funding for the Pentagon.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/21/new-whistleblowers-coming-forward-on-benghazi/
PK'S NOTE: I think this is a better idea that impeachment. Impeachment just makes Obama a victim in the eyes of some.
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